Grounding transnational business governance: A political‐strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South

Abstract

Recent scholarship on transnational business governance has begun to examine public-private interactions and the active role of governments. We make two key contributions that integrate and expand this literature. First, in juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, we foreground the fundamentally political and often contentious character of these interactions. As private transnational governance schemes and standards "hit the ground," private-public interactions, we argue, are embedded in national political arenas and tied to domestic distributional struggles among competing regulatory coalitions. Building upon multiple empirical streams of research, we develop a political-strategic framework that maps the diversity of Southern government responses (substitute, adopt, repurpose, replace, or reject) to transnational private governance. Our framework shows that government responses are a function of both strategic fit with domestic industrial capabilities and structures, and strength of developmental state capacity. Second, our proposed framework adopts the vantage point of Global South governments and industries, particularly how development challenges and strategic options within global value chains affect their understanding of, and responses to, transnational schemes and standards. This is an important corrective to a Northern bias in the private governance literature.

Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving

“…In juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, Marques and Eberlein (2021) adopt a political strategic perspective that explains variation in public-private governance interactions as a product of nationally determined political dynamics. They empirically ground their account in the responses of Global South governments to transnational business governance schemes originating in the Global North.…”

Grounding the Politics of Transnational Private Governance: Introduction to the Special Section

“…Moreover, we can expect a new generation of scholarship on the ensuing transformations resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and scores of structural effects that will last for decades. So far, rational institutionalist accounts have detailed how transnational private governance sets standards, gives access to a multiplicity of state and non-state actors in setting standards, creates innovative designs to monitor expected processes and outcomes, uses incentives supposed to improve suppliers' compliance, provides training and certification for business in organising global production networks, and ultimately reorganises the relations between state and market actors (Potoski and Prakash 2009, Levi-Faur 2011, Marques and Eberlein 2020. A number of studies have also theorised, among other things, the interactions of organisations involved in such mechanisms (Eberlein et al 2014, Malets and Quack 2017, Wood et al 2019, formal and informal roles of intermediaries between regulators and their so-called targets (Abbott et al 2017, Brès et al 2019, orchestration and designs (Abbott et al 2015).…”

Impeding corporate social responsibility: Revisiting the role of government in shaping business — Marginalized local community relations

“…Our article shows that far from simply retreating and letting business operate in a vacuum, as argued or assumed in most of the PCSR literature, the government played an instrumental role in shaping CSR. Hence, this paper brings the state back in, which others have advocated in business and society (Marques & Eberlein, 2020; Sallai & Schnyder, 2021).…”